🇮🇳 Pankaj Advani

Pankaj Arjan Advani was born on 24 July 1985 in Pune to a Sindhi family that had moved from Karachi to India during Partition. His father Arjan Advani worked in the petroleum industry and died when Pankaj was six. His mother Kajal moved the family to Bengaluru in 1991 to live closer to her brother. The young Advani was, by twelve, already playing billiards at the Karnataka State Billiards Association after his elder brother Shree had won the national amateur title. The coach Arvind Savur, a former national champion, accepted him into a daily five-hour training schedule at the KSBA after watching him pot fifteen consecutive shots in a single visit. Advani's first national-level title — the National Amateur — came when he was fifteen.

He won his first world title at eighteen in 2003 — the IBSF World Billiards Championship in time-format play, the youngest world champion ever in the sport. The next year he won the World Amateur Billiards Championship in point-format, becoming the first man in fifty years to win both billiards world titles in the same year. In 2008 he won his first World Professional Billiards Championship in Bengaluru, defeating Mike Russell — at the time the eight-time defending champion — in a final that lasted 11 hours over three days. The match is, in Advani's memoir Pause to Reflect, described as the moment 'the cue felt, for the first time, like an extension of my mind rather than of my hand.'

The 2014 season — in which he held five world titles simultaneously (billiards time and point formats, World 6-red snooker, World Snooker Amateur, World Team Billiards) — is, by general agreement among cue-sports historians, the most dominant single-year performance in the sport's history. He played 41 official world-tour matches that year and lost two. His average match-completion break was, in billiards, above 600 points (a 'good' professional break in the sport is 100). He defeated Mike Russell in the final of the World Professional Billiards Championship in Leeds despite Russell — playing on home soil — having beaten Advani in their previous three matches.

His cricket-comparable national fame in India is, by his own admission, lower than his number of world titles would predict. Cue sports, in India, do not have the broadcast presence of cricket; the BCCI cannot make money from billiards because crowds at the venue rarely exceed 300. Advani has, for two decades, been India's quietest sporting superstar — winning trophies in front of empty halls in Yangon, Glasgow, Doha and Bengaluru, and returning to a small first-class lounge at the airport. He has not been on a billboard. He has, however, been awarded both the Padma Shri (2009) and the Padma Bhushan (2018) — the third-highest civilian award in India, which only sixteen Indian sportspeople have ever held.

He attended the Sri Bhagawan Mahaveer Jain College in Bengaluru, where he completed a B.Com. He is married to Sezhian Naren, an interior designer from Chennai, and has a daughter, Ahaana. He spends, by his own admission, more time at chess and yoga than he does at billiards practice; the chess habit started after a friendship with Viswanathan Anand, who introduced him to the daily problem-solving discipline that, Advani says, transformed his cue-sports tactical approach. He continues to play, in 2026, with a billiards average for the recent senior year above 350 points per match — a number no other active player on the world tour has reached.

He is, in May 2026, 40 years old. He has not lost the World Professional Billiards Championship final since 2012. He is one of two non-British cue-sports players in history to have held five world titles simultaneously. He has, by his own counting, won 75 international matches in the past four years and lost four. The next world championship is in Manchester in October. The only question is how many he wins.